


The Case of the Interloper

by orphan_account



Series: The Case of Arthur and the Nemesis [1]
Category: Inception (2010), Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-15
Updated: 2011-03-15
Packaged: 2017-10-17 00:10:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,347
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/170838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“What if I told you I knew the world’s only consulting detective?” Eames asks.</p><p>“I’d ask what the fuck that is,” Arthur says, and Eames only answers with a huff of laughter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Case of the Interloper

Six months after Inception, six months after Dom settles safely with his kids, six months into jobs that seem drab in comparison, Arthur takes a vacation.

He mentions his plan after routine corporate espionage, when it’s just him and Eames in the hotel bar, drinking congratulatory drinks until they inevitably stumble upstairs and have drunk sex, like the end of every job, after congratulatory drinks or commiserative ones.

Eames’ answer is to look at him with wide eyes, and then feel his forehead. “Are you alright, my dearest?” he asks, all mock concern, and Arthur irritably slaps his hand away.

“Do you want to come or not?” Arthur asks.

“Was that an invitation?” Eames asks, and he sounds genuinely surprised. “You’re inviting me on your exclusive Arthur vacation?”

“Forget I asked,” Arthur asks, and pushes back from the table, dimly regretful that the only thing he’ll be fucking tonight is his hand.

“No, no,” Eames says, grabbing Arthur’s wrist. Arthur eyes him until he lets go. “No,” Eames says. “I mean yes. I’ll come with you.”

*

Arthur’s a little surprised he doesn’t regret asking. Not the next morning, when Eames is kicking at his foot in the airport, eyes scrolling down the list of destinations, not in the evening, when they land in Paris, not that night, when they tumble into bed, strung out on too much travel, in a hotel in Marseille.

He doesn’t regret it after, either, doesn’t regret fucking Eames sober, like that’s something they do, doesn’t regret waking up next to him without a hangover, with Eames’ cheek creased from the pillow, scruffy and grumpy until he’s had a shower and a cup of coffee. Arthur’s grumpy until he’s had three, but the coffee’s good here, strong, and Arthur doesn’t regret anything at all.

When people start trying to kill them, it isn’t much of a surprise. It’s an inconvenience, an unfortunate break in what had been an above average vacation, but not a surprise. It’s unsettling to have a bullet slam into the wall two inches above your head, but Arthur has inconvenienced a lot of people before, and he calls his contacts while they leave Marseilles, tries to figure out who it is he’s pissed off the most this time.

When it’s been two weeks, five cities and four attempted assassinations, with no word from anyone in the community about who wants them dead, Arthur has run out of patience. “We should split up,” Arthur says, staring at the ceiling in a Brussels hotel room, too tightly wound to sleep.

Eames shifts beside him. “Fuck that,” he says. “It’ll end with one of us killed.” And it’s true, maybe, that Eames’ reflexes had been the difference between Arthur’s brains in his head or splattered against a wall in Vienna, but it’s starting to weigh on him, the running. If it’s his death sentence, he’ll face it, and he wants Eames at least a country away before he does. “I have a better idea,” Eames says, stubble scratching against Arthur’s shoulder as he turns toward him.

“Oh?” Arthur asks.

“What if I told you I knew the world’s only consulting detective?” Eames asks.

“I’d ask what the fuck that is,” Arthur says, and Eames only answers with a huff of laughter.

*

Whatever Arthur would have expected from ‘the world’s only consulting detective’, it isn’t this, a perfectly normal house in a perfectly normal part of London. A matronly woman greets them and ushers them upstairs, and Arthur gives Eames a distinctly unimpressed look. Eames only grins crookedly back.

“Oh it’s you,” says the man opening the door to the second floor flat, sounding as unimpressed with Eames as Arthur currently feels. Arthur likes him immediately.

He changes his mind quickly, once introductions have been served and the man is watching him like a pinned butterfly, all cool scrutiny.

Sherlock Holmes is intimidating. Arthur has dealt with corporate thugs in suits, and mafia thugs with vests hidden under their shirts, and occasionally, thugs with the order to hit him until he breaks. Sherlock isn’t like that. He holds himself like he’s sure of something, of everything. Arthur knows, as soon as he turns those clear eyes on Arthur, once he’s paying attention, that he’s more dangerous than any thug could be.

The man who introduces himself as John isn’t like that. He fades in the background, oatmeal sweater and dirty blond hair, and Arthur wouldn’t give him a second glance if Eames wasn’t greeting him like a friend. Eames picks up extraordinary people the way an ordinary person would pick up souvenirs, and drops them just as quickly. And he's greeting John like he's still interesting, still important.

There’s pleasantries, at first, at least between John and Eames, who seem to have known one another for years. “The military,” Sherlock says, like he’s reading Arthur’s mind, and promptly returns to studying Arthur.

“So,” Sherlock says, clapping his hands together. “People are trying to murder you, how wonderful.”

“Sherlock,” John says, sounding disapproving.

“How terrible, I apologize, slip of the tongue,” Sherlock says, mouth twisting on the words like he’s tasted something rotten. “Do explain.”

They sit at a table that’s only half cleared off, Arthur blinking at a human skull while John busies himself in the kitchen making tea. Eames sketches out the details, all vague, nothing too incriminating, and Arthur doesn’t pay attention, too busy with his staring contest with a skull, until Eames throws the word PASIV in, and Sherlock interrupts.

“Dream-sharing, you mean,” Sherlock says, looking interested for the first time.

“How do you know about dream-sharing?” Arthur asks, turning back. It’s spread since he was military, since it was classified six ways over, but it’s still the province of men with more means than a king, of men with no scruples and too much money to burn.

“Sherlock knows everything,” John says, and though his tone is dry, Arthur can tell he believes it.

The tea is served while Sherlock interrogates Eames about dream-sharing, and Arthur judges from Eames’ happy sigh after a sip that it’s satisfactory. He leaves his untouched, because there’s something that looks suspiciously like a human hand on the kitchen counter.

John cuts off Sherlock’s questions after Eames starts to look a little hunted. Sherlock tries to protest, but John says, with finality, “we are going to catch up,” and drags a relieved looking Eames out of the room.

Arthur looks at Sherlock. Sherlock looks back at him, taking a sip of tea.

“So let’s see it, then,” Arthur says. “What makes you the world’s only consulting detective?”

“You’re smart,” Sherlock says. “Uncommonly so, and resourceful, but you believe in structure too much to ever be a genius. Middle child, aren’t you, never got enough attention, so you learned to be something worth paying attention to. You make yourself indispensible so that no one will forget you. You like danger because people think you're brave, but really, you don't care enough about yourself--”

“Okay,” Arthur says, cutting him off, his ears going red, and his throat strangely tight. “I get your point.”

Sherlock’s mouth quirks, just a little, and Arthur feels naked before him, like he can read his whole history in the shape of his eyes.

“Your man,” Sherlock muses. “It’s fascinating, he isn’t like a real person at all, is he? He makes no sense as a person, just collects quirks. He has the mind of a con-man, but he has the instincts of a soldier. Dangerous man, and not a very nice one, but he’s charming enough to hide that. He would do better to fade into the background if he took his work seriously, but he treats it like a game. He has too large an ego to allow people to ignore him, so he lets them underestimate him instead, just so he can prove them wrong.”

Arthur doesn’t know what to do with the information, so finally he just grits out, “he’s not my man.”

Sherlock just looks at him, unblinking, eyes the colour of steel and as unnerving as a gun pressed to the hollow of Arthur’s throat. “Funny,” he says. “I wouldn’t have taken you for the wilfully blind. He belongs to you as surely as the nine-millimetre strapped to your ankle. Beretta, isn’t it?”

Arthur swallows, says nothing. Sherlock just raises his eyebrows at him, radiating amusement at Arthur’s expense. “We are going to sit here in silence now,” Arthur tells him.

“As you wish,” Sherlock says, imperious, and then devotes his attention to texting. Arthur resumes his staring contest with the skull, and when Eames comes back out of John’s room, Arthur can barely resist grabbing his hand and running out of the house, out of London, out of England. Instead, they make plans to come back the next day, and Arthur only walks a little quickly out the door.

The first night, they settle in a flat Eames still keeps in the heart of London, stripped of anything too personal. Arthur reads up on The Science of Deduction while Eames makes dinner, or, more accurately, orders in Thai and then serves it on dusty plates, looking far too pleased with himself.

“What are we even doing here?” Arthur asks, over Pad Thai.

“He’ll figure it out,” Eames says.

“He’s a complete sociopath,” Arthur says.

“He makes you nervous,” Eames says.

“I didn’t say that,” Arthur says.

“He makes you nervous,” Eames repeats, with a grin. "I can't believe someone actually makes the almighty Arthur nervous."

“Fuck off,” Arthur mutters, and the rest of the meal is eaten in silence, Arthur ignoring the curve of Eames’ smile and the way Eames' foot nudges against his under the table.

*

The next day, Eames brings the PASIV over to Baker Street against Arthur’s wishes, and Sherlock spends a half hour poring over it, a half hour Arthur spends in blissfully bland conversation with Mrs. Hudson. She offers him cookies and her tea seems less likely to be contaminated with body parts, and Arthur fervently wishes she was the world’s only consulting detective.

After Sherlock tires of the mechanics of the device, he goes right back to questioning Arthur and Eames about it, and once he's exhausted their knowledge, he starts to look at the PASIV again, a sort of greed in his features.

They dream at Sherlock’s insistence. Arthur can’t figure out how it’ll help, and John offers similar protests, but Eames takes Sherlock’s side, presumably just to torture Arthur. Arthur takes it slow at first, takes them into his mind, tries to ease them in, but Sherlock bullies his way through every lesson, wants to know more and more, and by the afternoon, they’re sinking into Sherlock’s mind.

Sherlock’s mind is the most terrifying place Arthur has ever been. John’s would be scarier to most, an explosion of a warzone, projections relentless and trained, quick to kill, all the militarization he’d ever need. John’s mind has never left the war, but Sherlock’s mind is chaos embodied, every colour saturated, every sound magnified, until Arthur is entirely overwhelmed by sensation, unable to pick out what’s important.

His projections are still and silent, but all of them measure him with the same cold, calculating eyes, and every single one of them finds him wanting. They’re not violent, but Arthur feels their stares like knives under his skin.

Sherlock seems entirely unsurprised by the place they’ve found themselves in, interrogates his own projections like they’re more than a manifestation of himself, and Arthur wonders if his world is like this all the time. Wonders how he could live in a world like that. John stands beside him, still and silent, and more unnerving than anything else, than the sounds or the colours or the unblinking eyes, is the way John looks entirely at home.

“Brilliant,” John breathes, to the side of him, and Sherlock looks up, grins at John like he’s heard him.

Arthur would call Sherlock insane, but that isn’t the right word, the inside of him screaming out, like there isn’t enough space to contain his mind. It’s hyper-reality, and Arthur’s nauseous within minutes, wants to cut himself out of the dream and hide in Eames’ flat under the covers, a pillow over his head, wants to break out of sensation.

John’s gone off with Sherlock gallivant, to _play_ , the two of them giggling over something like schoolchildren with a secret. Eames remains nearby, his hands in his pockets, inscrutable except for the way his eyes are taking everything in, meticulous. He comes slouching over. “Alright?” he asks, and Arthur can’t read his expression through the mess of extraneous information. Arthur feels paralyzed, stuck in place.

Eames’ hand comes up, a switchblade clasped in it like a magic trick, and Arthur closes his eyes as Eames lets it saw through him, cut into the heat into him. Arthur wakes up gasping.

Eames comes up a few seconds later. “That was like an American mall,” he grouches as Arthur tries to put himself back together, adjust to the suddenly drab walls, to the fact Sherlock and John look washed out, dead in sleep, after the technicolour of the dream. “Too much of everything.”

“Yeah,” Arthur says, and his voice cracks like he’s been asleep for days.

“Are you alright?” Eames asks him again, and Arthur nods, too jerky to be convincing, even to himself.

Five minutes later, John and Sherlock come up with the kick, and they’re smiling.

Arthur goes to the bathroom to vomit up his lunch, shaky on his own legs, like he’s been at sea for years and just alighted on dry land. After a few minutes Eames opens the door, sitting cross-legged on the floor beside him, hand curved over the small of his back.

“Go away,” Arthur mumbles, between dry heaves.

“No,” Eames says, and stays.

*

They spend the next two days dreaming, though they stay in the neutral zones of Arthur’s mind, of Eames’. Sherlock practically begs to go back into his own head, and sulks like a child when Arthur shuts him down, but once he’s dreaming, he’s content to explore the world, deducing the bits of Arthur’s subconscious as easily as he’d deduced him, discerning the paradoxes and unearthing secrets.

“He’d make a terrifying extractor,” Eames murmurs beneath his breath at one point.

“Never mention that to him,” Arthur warns.

“Christ, Arthur, do I look like a masochist?” Eames asks.

Arthur eyes him.

“Other than with you, I mean,” Eames adds, and he doesn’t look repentant until Arthur kicks him in the shin. Being around Sherlock makes Arthur feel childish. It’s intolerable.

*

It’s the third day of dreaming, of the exhaustion of dreaming without a goal, pure creation and no meaning, when after a dinner of take-away Chinese, Sherlock snaps his fingers and jumps up.

“You,” Sherlock snaps at Eames. “Come with me. I need to test a theory.”

Eames raises an eyebrow at Arthur, then shrugs, getting up far too slowly for Sherlock’s liking, judging from the way he’s practically vibrating with impatience. They’re out the door before Arthur can do more than vaguely worry that Eames will return missing a limb.

“Pub?” John asks, sounding unbothered, and Arthur follows him down the street to a place that seems all John, a little run-down with tired workers and a soccer game on mute in the background.

“What are you to him?” Arthur asks after the second drink, because he’s been watching for days, and he still can’t figure it out, can’t figure out how they fit together, how Sherlock can stride along so quickly without leaving John in the dust behind him. John’s solid, and Sherlock seems to rip through things like a hurricane, all uncontrolled devastation, and Arthur can’t figure it out. It bothers him.

“I’m his blogger,” John says, wry, and then, more seriously, “and his gun. What’re you to Eames?”

Arthur doesn’t have an answer, and they watch the rest of the game in silence, drinking their beers. There isn’t a single goal.

They’re at Baker Street first, both drowsy with alcohol and watching some talk show. Within an hour, Sherlock bursts through the door, looking triumphant. Eames comes in after him, face a set line, and Arthur sits up straight. Beside him, John’s doing the same.

“We were shot at!” Sherlock says. “It was marvellous!”

“What?” John barks, and he’s up in a second, hands under Sherlock’s coat like he’s feeling for a wound.

“You get any of them?” Arthur asks, and Eames shakes his head, looking tired.

“Your place?” Arthur asks, and Eames nods, takes him back and lets Arthur undress him, ensure that there’s nothing hidden, no wound, no scrapes, no scars that Arthur isn’t already aware of, that Arthur hasn’t mapped with the flat of his tongue.

“He’ll figure it out,” Eames says, but he doesn’t sound as sure.

*

It’s the fifth day when Arthur snaps. There’s been more pointless dreaming, more days stretching out intolerably without a clue, with Arthur looking around every time he leaves a building, waiting for the next step to be the one when his head is blown off. He’s strung tight with tension, with waiting for the ball to drop, and Eames is looking more and more tired. He smiles less. Arthur didn’t realise how much he smiled until he stopped.

When Sherlock suggests dreaming that morning, nibbling on a piece of half burnt toast, Arthur answers with a curt “No.”

Sherlock’s brow furrows, like he doesn’t understand being denied. “Why?” he asks finally, with a faint frown.

“You can’t even figure out who's trying to kill us,” Arthur snaps. “So what’s the fucking point?”

“Oh, that,” Sherlock says, like he’s forgotten.

“Yes, that,” Arthur says. “That, the reason we’re here. The fact people are trying to _kill us_. That.”

“I figured that out on the second day,” Sherlock says breezily.

“Excuse me?” Arthur asks, unsure if he’s heard him correctly.

“Up and coming heisters, see you as competition, figure if they take you out they’ll get respect,” Sherlock recites. “Boring. Though they’re dreadfully incompetent, aren’t they? It's almost impressive.”

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Arthur asks, hands fisting on the table-top. “Jesus, you got _shot at_.”

“And it was tremendous fun,” Sherlock agrees.

Arthur stares at him.

“I figured you wouldn’t let me play with your toys if I told,” Sherlock says, sounding a little sulky about it.

Arthur sees red, and before he’s even realised he’s out of his chair, there’s a grip on his arms. Diminutive little John, who Arthur figured he could throw off, but who has a grip like steel. “I’m going to hit him,” Arthur tells him.

“I understand the urge,” John says, but his grip only tightens. “Sit down,” he says, and Arthur doesn’t move until he’s exerting pressure, twisting Arthur’s arm until it’s threatening to pull out of the socket. In his peripheral, Arthur sees Eames stand abruptly, and Arthur tightens his jaw, ignores his ego.

He sits.

“I’ll just go make some tea, then,” John says brightly, and pats Arthur’s shoulder before he leaves the room.

“You people are insane,” Arthur says incredulously. He thought he’d grown used to it; insanity was often the price of dreaming, but this is an entirely new category. He followed Dom around the world, saw Mal alive and dead, and he still isn’t quite sure how to react to this, John humming in the kitchen and Sherlock’s smug smile and the fact he’s almost positive Eames is muffling a laugh behind his hand, a sound Arthur is a little ashamed he wants to hear, after days of its lack.

“Quite,” Sherlock says, dry. “Now would you like their names now or after the tea?”

Arthur looks at Eames, who has sat back down on the couch. Eames just offers him a commiserating look, the edges of a smile curling on his face.

“After tea, I guess,” Arthur says tiredly.

“Excellent,” John says from the kitchen. “Biscuits?”

“Biscuits,” Arthur agrees, and finally gives into the urge to put his face into his hands.


End file.
